[ih] patent licenses, not Why the six month draft expiration ?

[John R. Levine]

>> Let's say someone gives us (ISOC, whoever) a patent, and we offer $1 
>> licenses.  Then someone else shows up and claims our patent is invalid. Or 
>> per Brian, the way we collected the patents makes us a de facto patent 
>> pool.  Or whatever.  Even if the suits have little merit, as I'm sure you 
>> know defending even the crappiest patent suit costs a fortune.  If we 
>> require people to indemnify us for suits related to their free patents, 
>> that rather defeats the whole purpose.
>
> In general, because of presumptive validity of claims, it is less expensive 
> to defend an issued patent than to attack one.

The more I think about this, the less sense it makes.  If you want to give 
everyone a free license to your patent, just stop paying the maintenance 
fees and abandon it.  If you want to give limited licenses, that's fine, 
but it's up to you to enforce the patent against people outside the 
license terms, not anyone else.  Why in the world would ISOC want to get 
involved in this stuff?  The potential cost is huge, the practical benefit 
to them and to standards users minimal.

>> For copyrights, in the US you can abandon copyright basically by saying so.
>
> Not everyone has a libertarian view of the world; some people, perhaps most 
> people, like to retain some control over their expressions.  I know that, 
> speaking for myself, that I'd appreciate if the copyright rights to these 
> discussions of Internet history on this list were not cast into the public 
> domain (where they could be freely and even maliciously manipulated), but, 
> rather, were held by an organization by something like ISOC or the Computer 
> History Museum where the integrity of the discussions are likely to be 
> maintained.

Too late:

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  https://www.internetsociety.org/become-a-member/code-of-conduct/

I am not aware of any case law in which someone enforced a copyright claim 
on messages contributed to generally accessible web sites or mailing 
lists.  Yes, I'm aware of the OpenAI suits but the ones from the authors 
are stupid, and the one from the Times has quite different factual 
assertions.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly